ESPEasy for ESP32

ESPEasy is a very nice framework to get started quickly if you want to create a sensor node with an ESP8266. There are many different kind of flavors available. The development boards like NodeMCU, are cheap and easy to get. ESPEasy is especially useful for beginners or lazy people as there is no need to re-invent the wheel aka write or collect all the parts (reading the values from attached sensors, MQTT integration, OTA updates, etc.) by yourself. Also, you can switch sensors during runtime without re-compiling, just update the configuration and you are good to go.

For the ESP32 (“success” of the ESP8266) are also frameworks available like esphomelib and uPyEasy. esphomelib supports features which make it easy to integrate with Home Assistant but lacks essential features like i2C support and requires additional work to get it going. Unfortunatly, not for beginners. uPyEasy is Micropython-based. Using Micropython with the ESP32 is really fun. But uPyEasy also lacks features and feels like alpha. I’m really hoping that this will change soon as using Python on micro controllers is very straight-forward.

The team behind ESPEasy was, of course, not sitting around. They ported ESPEasy to the ESP32 and called it simply ESPEasy32.

To get ESPEasy32 on your ESP32, you need a tool. We are going to use
esptool which will handle the flashing process. On Fedora execute:

1

$sudo dnf-yinstall esptool

Download ESPEasy32_R20100.zip and unzip it. Change to the directory where the content of the archive is stored and then to
ESP32flash . Let’s erase the flash first. Adjust the port if needed.

After the reboot there will be a Access Point available with the SSID ESP_Easy_0 and the password configesp. Connect to that AP and open http://192.168.4.1 in a browser to perform the initial setup. Now follow those steps even if the frontend doesn’t match will they give you a hint to configure your ESP32.